The physics around this is complex.
When it comes to life, we're dealing with non-equilibrium thermodynamics. And irreversible processes.
The best studied example so far, is the actin-myosin interaction in a contracting muscle. It uses up ATP, and the way it does is what matters.
Actin and myosin are a subset of cellular motility. Like the microtubules we discussed earlier.
To understand what's happening with actin and myosin, we have to invoke a basic principle of quantum mechanics: energy can take all available paths at the same time. (This is a guiding principle in Feynman diagrams, as they apply to things like quantum tunneling).
The simplest example of this comes from plants and bacteria, in a molecule called the FMO complex, which is common in green sulfur bacteria. It is a pigment-protein that harvests energy from light. It could not do what it does, without the quantum effects.
en.wikipedia.org
Well, it turns out, actin and tubulin behave in a somewhat similar manner. Not only that, but the membrane "pores" we talked about earlier also exhibit some of these characteristics.
The deal is, that during the ratcheting of the myosin head, the myosin, actin, and ATP behave like a single molecule. Their wave functions merge, there is entanglement between them. The same thing happens in the ion pores, where the entanglement is reflected as tunneling. In muscle, the myosin head moves spatially, but it is trapped in an energy well until the ATP transfer is finished.
The proposed model is characterized by the constant r (Eq. 2-1), the induced potential (Fig. 1), two attached states of a myosin head (Fig. 1), the nonlinear elastic property of the crossbridge (Eq. 2-7), and the expression of U* (Eqs. 3-8 and 3-9), which led us to the following conclusions. 1...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
One can NOT look at these processes using classical physics, because doing so leads to very large violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Instead, one must use non-equilibrium quantum mechanics so as to understand the available energy flows.
In the case of the FMO complex, the multiple simultaneous pathways result in nearly 100% energy efficiency. Which is an astounding result that wouldn't be possible at all but for the irreversibility of wave function collapse. The collapse happens at the point of energy exhaustion, just like it does for myosin.
So now, we are fulfilling ALL THREE of the essential requirements for consciousness. We have a synthetic reference frame by virtue of entanglement, the entanglement spans the time frame of the chemical reaction, AND there is ongoing (molecular) sensory and motor activity the whole time.
It is probably obvious that this is a highly reductionist model. The idea is, we have to put millions and billions of these together, before we get anything resembling a qualia.
Qualia:
en.wikipedia.org
One of the important papers on qualia comes from Antonio Damasio at USC. But he's a psychologist, he speaks a different language.
en.wikipedia.org
You have to think a little to grasp the connection. It's okay, it takes time. (It took me about 6 months, then one day I just woke up and said "duh").
Life is biophysics. All of it. Including consciousness. Anything we can find in humans, has correlates at the nanoscopic level. Single cells are large enough to accommodate a rudimentary awareness, but not large enough to make much use of it. For that we need ensembles of cells working together
In the human brain, every time a neuron fires there is a magnetic field associated with it. Neurons in the hippocampal CA1 region reach criticality in time with the theta rhythm (maybe 7-8 times a second), and the firing of ONE neuron in the adjoining EC2 region is sufficient to collapse the criticality.
Non-local, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, built on irreversible processes. That's life.
www.nature.com
